Get Involved

HUMA has a number of opportunities for you to get involved in the life of the community. The board is always thrilled to receive help and meet new people to help us grow the organization. Below you can find out about some of the ways to get involved – if you have other ideas, we’d love to hear them!

Become a City Rep

For a number of months now, the board has been brainstorming ways to re-vitalize HUMA and bring its membership closer together. As a result, we hosted a number of events and initiatives across different cities in the U.S. and internationally, such as releasing our first newsletter, organizing communal iftaars during Ramadan, socials in Boston and New York, and the annual Alumni dinner on campus. Although the events have been successful, it was humbling for us to realize that there is only so much the board can accomplish on its own. Given how diverse and geographically dispersed our membership is, we need active leaders in different cities to help nurture a sense of community necessary for us to thrive and realize our full potential as an organization.

HUMA City Representatives will play an integral role in engaging their fellow Muslim alumni to foster long-term relationships with one another and HUMA as an organization by providing leadership support for alumni activities on a regional level. He or she will work with HUMA board in coordinating social activities for the HUMA members in their region, solicit news about fellow class members to be submitted in the bi-annual HUMA Newsletter and recruit new members in the community.

If you are interested in being involved, please send our VP-Internal an email at dyergasheva@gmail.com and we'll try to set up a conference call to discuss the role further and brainstorm what we can do with it as a group. Again, please do consider volunteering your time and energy - we would really appreciate it!

In 2011 HUMA released its inaugural newsletter. The letter received tremendous amount of positive feedback from our members. If you’d like to help us brainstorm the content of the letter or work on its layout – we would be thrilled!

If you are too busy to, there are plenty of other ways for you to contribute to the letter. For example, you could:

Submit a short life update. weddings, new children, travels, graduate schools, exciting career developments, etc. - for the community news portion of the letter.

Write a one-page Op-ed. You're welcome to write on any topic of interest that you feel will better inform the community.

Be featured in our Alumnus/ae Spotlight. The section allows you to share more about yourself with the community. Topics can range from travels, major accomplishments, turning points in life, personal interests, and anything in between. Each edition will highlight one member and be approximately one page.

In the fall of 2008, with the intention of building a stronger community, HUMA launched its first Global Iftaar program. Since then, a series of alumni iftaars have been held all around the world (London, NYC, Boston, Cairo, San Francisco, Lahore, DC, Dubai, Houston, Istanbul, to name a few). The program has been quite successful in bringing together Harvard's Muslim graduates, who are scattered in far corners of the world. These iftaar dinners are continually a great opportunity to reconnect with fellow graduates, reminisce, network in a casual setting, as well as learn about HUMA’s latest initiatives. If you’d like to organize an iftaar in your city, please reach out to our VP-Internal.

In the past two years, we hosted a few social mixers with other Muslim alumni associations, including Columbia, Stanford, UPenn, and MIT in Boston and New York City. We hope that these inter-MSA socials will not only encourage new friendships, but also will serve as a platform for future collaborations such as volunteer initiatives and other partnerships. In the upcoming few months, we are planning to host a few more inter-MSA socials. If you’d like to help host a HUMA social in your city or have any suggestions for future events, please contact our VP Internal.

In the upcoming year, we hope to host our first volunteer event. So far we thought about co-sponsoring one with Habitat for Humanity and New York Cares. If you have exciting ideas for such a community service event and would like to help us plan one, please reach out to our VP-Internal.